Goblin Market

828 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Women in 19th literature

Critical Analysis: The Goblin Market Gender/Feminist Theory Michael Do Many critics consider the Goblin Market as one of Christiana Rossetti’s masterpieces. Written during the Victorian Era, the fairy-tale poem portrays two girls, Lizzie and Laura, tempted by goblins selling a variety of luscious fruits in a glen. As the goblins cry “come buy, come buy” (verse 4) day and night, Laura is subdued by the goblins’ temptation despite Lizzie’s warning “not [to] look at goblin men… not [to] buy their fruits”, and becomes insane for the longing of the fruit afterwards. After Laura’s downfall into temptation, her health deteriorates and she begins to age prematurely. Out of fear for her sister’s life, Lizzie travels to the goblins’ market to purchase a cure for Laura. In the end, Lizzie’s sacrifice and resistance to the goblin physical abuse and temptation breaks the spell cast on Laura. Rossetti’s poem presents presents a perfect interpretation of a gender war between men and women, and becoming a symbol of women’s empowerment. The poem even goes so far as to say that the bond the two sisters share is stronger than between a man and a women for “there is no friend like a sister/ in calm or stormy weather”. Through the lens of a feminist, the characters of the poem represent the two different gender roles during the Victorian Era. Upon reading the Goblin Market, the portrayal of women as innocent beings shows a clear representation of the Victorian perspective. The usage of the word “maid” to describe Lizzie and Laura suggests these women are young unmarried innocent virgins. On the other hand, the goblins represent the role of men. In the poem, Rossetti provides animal characteristics to the Goblins, for example, “One whisk’d a tail…One... ... middle of paper ... ... to help with their desire for greediness, and the author uses the symbol of the goblins within the context of the poem to enforce the male role in the Victorian society. Furthermore, the author uses the language of sexual violence while the goblins are attacking Lizzie to indicate she is in fact being violently raped as “They trod and hustled her, Claw’d with their nails, Barking, mewing, hissing, mocking, Tore her gown and soil’d her stocking,”. However, Lizze is able to hold onto her dignity and virtue through the form of a sliver penny, to which the sliver penny, in an Elizabethan term, is representation for the female genitalia. Works Cited https://depts.washington.edu/egonline/2010/04/2008-09-winner-christina-rossetti%E2%80%99s-goblin-market-finding-the-middle-ground-by-jasmine-yeh/ http://www.gradesaver.com/christina-rossetti-poems/study-guide/section5/

Show More
Related

  • Apology For Want Summary

    430 Words  | 1 Pages

    Surprisingly, the poem shifts its focus off of love and to a very similar subject, although it has a slightly less favorable connotation: desire. "Tomorrow [is] getting shorter, even as we speak. In this flinty age of materialism we've gorown fond of witches - they embody our with to believe, to immerse ourselves...to be welcomed into imprudence, the elevated tor, unbreakable oath." She seems to be reaching out, saying that people in general have succumbed to materialism, that the ideal of love as it was presented previously was something which is quickly becoming lost to humanity. The people will now turn to "witches," symbolically implying that mankind will follow a false path in the hopes of his own advancement.

    Read More

  • Marge Piercy’s Barbie Doll

    604 Words  | 2 Pages

    The poem starts with the line, “This girlchild was born as usual,” which suggests that as soon as a girl is born, society already expects her to learn the role she will soon play in when she hits puberty (1). Thus, showing why we are given dolls as little girls to illustrate how we should act and appear according to society. After we learn all the roles we will soon take part in, “the magic of puberty,” hits and girls immediately begin applying the ideals to their own lives (5). As if this attempt to conform is not enough we have other people telling us we are not to perfect. “You have a great big nose and fat legs,” says a classmate to the girl (6). This type of pressure can slowly but surely destroy even the little confidence women do have in themselves.

    Read More

  • Early Twentieth Century Literature: Perkings, Chopin, Fitzgerald

    1158 Words  | 3 Pages

    When studying gender roles in history, one will find that females are often depicted in similar ways no matter the era or region of study. Even when comparing the industrialized, early, twentieth century to today’s progressive era, there are striking similarities between female roles. We can see that over the course of the twentieth century, the qualities of loyalty and honesty have decreased in marriages due to the treatment of the two main female roles as depicted literature. The first was the role of the wife. The wife was often portrayed as a housekeeper and a nanny. Dull in appearance, there was no aesthetic beauty to this typical female. The other main role was the “other woman.” The more mysterious and promiscuous character, this woman portrayed the other part of the female population. Both of these types of characters are composites that portrayed the average, disposable female while how they were treated conveyed the general handling of females in the early, twentieth century.

    Read More

  • Equal Rights for Women in The Natural by Bernard Malamud

    1063 Words  | 3 Pages

    Literatures had always been the reflections of the world’s issues. These literatures showed the problems within society in the period of time. In the book, “The Natural”, by Bernard Malamud had developed how women were seen as an object to men that they did not have the equal rights and social status as men. Also, women in the novel were classified as the trophies to men, whom they were either gold diggers digging for massive fortunes for the future, or accomplishments for men to chase after them. The author had established several female characters to optimize these issues. In the novel, Harriet Bird, Memo Paris, and Iris Lemon were representing different figures of female in that period of time. Both Harriet and Memo were being the negative effects to the main protagonist, Roy Hobbes, while Iris was the positive hope for Roy. The author chose to use these few characters to criticize the stereotypes of women in that period, and how they affected the others around them.

    Read More

  • Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott

    784 Words  | 2 Pages

    According to Sarah Elbert, a literary critic, the term “little women” referred to the Dickensian meaning: It represented the period in a young woman’s life where childhood overlapped with young womanhood.6 Other views have suggested that the title was meant to illustrate the inferiority of women, or to describe the lives of people who are “unimportant” in society.7 Alcott created an entirely new form of literature in Little Women; she took elements from Romantic children’s fiction and combined them w...

    Read More

  • Gender Roles in Alice Munro’s Boys and Girls

    1095 Words  | 3 Pages

    In Alice Munro’s short story “Boys and Girls,” our narrator is a young farm girl on the verge of puberty who is learning what it means to be a “girl.” The story shows the differing gender roles of boys and girls – specifically that women are the weaker, more emotional sex – by showing how the adults of the story expect the children to grow into their respective roles as a girl and a boy, and how the children grow up and ultimately begin to fulfill these roles, making the transition from being “children” to being “young adults.”

    Read More

  • Fairytales and Gender

    595 Words  | 2 Pages

    The pervasiveness of passive heroines in popular versions of fairytales and folklore has long afforded feminist critics a rich hunting ground to criticize the roles forced on women by patriarchal societies. In The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros uses allusions to female heroines in children’s tales in many of the novel’s vignettes to create a portrait of expected feminine roles within a Latino patriarchal community and recasts the tales to “reveal the true-to-life consequences for women who are socialized to live their lives waiting for the happy ending” (Spencer 278). The women of Mango Street are shown to conform to the traditional roles espoused by quintessential fairy and folk tale heroines. However, their lives, as described through the voice of young Esperanza, are far from magical. Instead The House on Mango Street is suggestive of a social reality in which the women’s lives are constrained by gender roles and social mores. This research paper will endeavour to demonstrate how Esperanza’s coming-of-age transition to an empowered Chicana can only be achieved by rejectin...

    Read More

  • Gender Roles in Little House on the Prairie

    2315 Words  | 5 Pages

    During the Victorian Era, society had idealized expectations that all members of their culture were supposedly striving to accomplish. These conditions were partially a result of the development of middle class practices during the “industrial revolution… [which moved] men outside the home… [into] the harsh business and industrial world, [while] women were left in the relatively unvarying and sheltered environments of their homes” (Brannon 161). This division of genders created the ‘Doctrine of Two Spheres’ where men were active in the public Sphere of Influence, and women were limited to the domestic private Sphere of Influence. Both genders endured considerable pressure to conform to the idealized status of becoming either a masculine ‘English Gentleman’ or a feminine ‘True Woman’. The characteristics required women to be “passive, dependent, pure, refined, and delicate; [while] men were active, independent, coarse …strong [and intelligent]” (Brannon 162). Many children's novels utilized these gendere...

    Read More

  • Olivers Market

    1751 Words  | 4 Pages

    What competitive pressures must Oliver’s Market be prepared to deal with? What do we learn about the nature and strength of the competitive pressures Oliver’s faces from doing five-forces analysis of competition? Which of the five competitive forces is the strongest?

    Read More

  • Comparing Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market and William Wordsworth’s The Thorn

    1707 Words  | 4 Pages

    Even so, she understood the impossibility of any such personally ideal world. The poem illustrates this realization by including the Goblin men, who seem to haunt the female characters. The Goblin men’s low-pitched cries follow the girls. Laura and Lizzie constantly hear the goblins in the forest: “.Morning and evening / Maids hear the goblins cry.”

    Read More

  • The Influence of Gender in "Girl" by Jamaica Kincaid

    672 Words  | 2 Pages

    Women in Literature: Reading Through the Lens of Gender. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2003. Print. The. Bailey, Carol. "

    Read More

  • Analysis From Feminist/Gender Critic Of Book Wicked

    1930 Words  | 4 Pages

    Picture a child sitting in front of a television watching the Wizard of Oz. To them, it is an assortment of magical beings, a land filled with wonderful places, with varieties of different colors. They do not picture it as something with far more meaning than just a plain fairytale. On the other hand, gender/feminist critics have been able to analyze the Wizard of Oz as well as Wicked, in order to find a more elaborate meaning behind the story itself. They have discussed what lies behind the story when it comes to the issue of sexism and masculinity towards the book itself as well as the characters. There are many concepts as well that help to further explain feminism and gender criticism. The four concepts that will be discussed later on are gender, feminist writings, patriarchal society, and gynocriticism. These concepts will then be reviewed as to how they play a part in the book Wicked.

    Read More

  • Alice Munro's Boys and Girls

    1063 Words  | 3 Pages

    In Alice Munro’s “Boys and Girls” she tells a story about a young girl’s resistance to womanhood in a society infested with gender roles and stereotypes. The story takes place in the 1940s on a fox farm outside of Jubilee, Ontario, Canada. During this time, women were viewed as second class citizens, but the narrator was not going to accept this position without a fight.

    Read More

  • Virgina Woolf and Feminism

    1749 Words  | 4 Pages

    In A Room of One's Own the narrator begins an exploration of women in literature. She attempts to answer many questions regarding women. The first being why is literature about women written by men. She also critiques the scholarship of the great men of literature.

    Read More

  • Goblin Market Essay

    1824 Words  | 4 Pages

    Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” compares the two main Victorian views towards women. One of them is represented by Lizzie who despite the attempts of the men to tempt her to consume the goblin fruit remains pure and innocent. The other view is represented by Laura who eats the goblin

    Read More

More about Goblin Market

Open Document